nd I had to pick up what I could of the
trial, as it went on, from gossip and reading of papers in my own room
after I had gone to bed. Sometimes I'd wheel Julianna down the street to
the court-house, and then I'd see men with fingers raised as if they
were all barristers, or imitating barristers, standing on the
court-house steps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the
sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers,
sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old
soldiers' home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and
disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out
of the open windows, and perhaps the jury walking in pairs and acting
very important, with a deputy sheriff taking them over to the Lenox Cafe
for their lunch. The murder mystery had brought up a lot of curious
people from the city, and I remember one--a woman with folds of skin
under her chin and plenty of diamond rings--who wiped her eyes,
pretending there were tears in them.

"Where is the court-house?" she said to me, just as if she could not see
it. "_I_ was the woman's most _intimate_ friend _once_."

That was the way with most everybody. They did not like the thought of
the poor dead woman or the horror of it, but only the thought of being
important and knowing something about it that the next one did not know.
One girl in the town--a daughter of the biggest grocer and quite a
belle--could imitate the screams she had heard and did it over and over,
because she was begged by her girl friends, and so she was something of
a heroine and thought for still another reason to be a good person to
know.

The Judge was made of different stuff, I can tell you. We did not have
many criminal trials in our family, so to speak, and I think it must
have eaten well into his heart, for he was very silent and grave at
meals and never laughed, except when he came up to play with the baby
and ride the little thing, with its lolling head and big eyes, on his
knee.

It took over a week to finish the trial after they had begun it. They
had wanted to trace John Chalmers's history, but he would tell nothing
of it himself, and his past was a mystery, and there was a feeling among
those who discussed the case that this would be against him. In fact,
every one said he was surely guilty. He had misused his wife's life; he
was a drunkard and subject to fits of violence; he had asked his wi